July 11, 2007

Winds of change

Now, I don’t know… I hear ambient noise of just about everything in my house. The fridge, the furnace, the air conditioning, the fan, the computers and their fans (which I hear all through the night)… I should tell you that, when my parents left the house for a week (I’m twenty and live with my parents, or at least I will for a bit longer), I turned off their computer–which is in the dead center of the house–and quickly realized how completely eerie it was not to hear its fan. I mean, it sounds enlightening–the noise of a heathen Windows box give way to an aura of silence–but instead, it was actually terrifying. Counterintuitive as it may be, I turned it back on just for the purpose of the ambient noise. Otherwise, I was going to freak out, like Bill Gates in a black cloak would sneak up behind me and say, “It looks like you’re trying to write a letter, bitch!“

So I think ambient noise is pretty relative. If anything, we should be distracted by the crime of all the people who die each year from air pollution, all the windpower in the world that goes untapped, and the power barons (quite literally) who have our personal finances–and the governments–by the genitals with their supply of the power that we depend on. So, I mean… if the noise were more like an aircraft taking off, or an LA freeway, I would say that windmill is ahead of its time. As it stands, there’s so much ambient noise in anybody’s house I hardly think something to generate clean power should be a problem. The NYT says it’s about the level of “light traffic, or a noisy refridgerator.” I’d say that’s the noise of freedom, and that kind of damn-the-system innovation ought to be supported, not punished.